Sharp and Glorious
by burnmedown
Summary: "Stella," her father says, "I need you to do something for me. Do not look at the news or the internet. Not until someone is there with you." That's when she knows.
1. Chapter 1

I finished this back around the end of May or beginning of June, and it has just been sitting in Google Drive ever since. I couldn't decide what to do with it, so I'm just throwing it out there on the off chance someone might enjoy it. It's pretty different from my norm - but not in a character death sort of way this time, I promise.

* * *

Stella decides to tell her parents in person.

She knows if she tells her mom over the phone, said phone will then be handed off to her father ("Please talk some sense into your daughter") and she'll have to run through the entire explanation all over again. This way, at least she only has to do it once.

So they go out to dinner, and at a lull in conversation, Stella squares her shoulders, takes a breath, and gets it over with. "Clay and I have gotten back together."

There may as well be a record scratch sound effect. Her parents stare at her in blank disbelief. Stella bites her tongue, resists the urge to fall all over herself trying to explain, and waits for them to make the next move.

Her father speaks first, his tone measured as always, but underlaid with quiet, searing disappointment. "I thought that was over. You said you hadn't even seen him in weeks."

"At the time, I hadn't. It was… there was…" _Deep breath. You can do this._ "Something happened."

"Well," her mother says, "whatever it was, I can't believe you let it make you forget what you'd already figured out on your own. Stella, you don't belong in-"

Stella's eyes burn with tears. She wishes she could take it back, just have one more quiet evening, but it's too late for that. Interrupting her mother, she says, in a voice that only trembles a little, "The bomb was an improvised explosive device. They used a pressure cooker."

Her mom stops talking. Both of her parents stare at her.

"When it went off," Stella continues, "Clay was standing so close that it literally blew him out of his shoes. A piece of shrapnel severed the femoral nerve in his right leg and damaged the artery. He nearly bled out. His team's medic saved his life."

Her father exhales slowly. "Stella…"

She plows on. "While he was recovering, his friend who had moved in to help him died by suicide. Clay was the one who found him. It's been two months since the bombing and he's still in pain all the time but he doesn't want sympathy for himself. He's just heartbroken that he failed to save his friend." She looks her parents in the eyes and says, "He's one of the best human beings I know."

Stella's mom and dad are both a little pale. They glance at each other, clearly trying to decide how to respond. Finally her dad ventures, "These injuries, do they mean he won't be going in the field anymore?"

She can see how much they both want the answer to be 'yes.' Stella would probably hope for the same thing if she didn't know how much it would devastate Clay to never be able to operate again.

She says, "Not necessarily. They've got him in a rehab program. I guess the Navy feels confident that he will recover with time."

Stella's father takes a moment to gather his thoughts. Obviously choosing his words carefully, he says, "Stella, I'm not going to argue with you about him being a good man. I believe you that he is, but that doesn't mean his life is right for you. When the next bomb comes, and it _will,_ what are the odds that he'll survive?" He pauses to let that sink in. "And even if he does, do you think he'll still be the same man after 20 years of this? The way Clay found his friend, that could be you finding him one day."

_Is that how you feel?_

_Brett felt that way._

She knows that. Of course she does. She just doesn't know how to reconcile it with how much she cares for this man, wants to spend her life with him, raise children with him.

While they were broken up, she tried dating other guys. She did. It didn't work because none of them were Clay.

Stella has to clear her throat before she can talk. "I know the risks. But I love him, Dad, so much, and I don't want to let the fear of what _could_ happen make me miss out on the love of my life."

Her mother jumps in. "But where is the line between fear and prudence?"

"Honestly?" Stella raises her shoulder in a shrug. "I don't know, but it's something I have to figure out for myself. No one else can make that decision for me."

They are apparently wise enough to realize that further arguing will get them nowhere right now, so they let it go.

The next time all four of them get together for dinner, she has Clay pick the place. He chooses a small, cozy West African cafe, where he shows off his language skills by immediately befriending the owners.

The first time Clay met Stella's parents, he was open and honest and sincere, as though he believed he could win them over by baring his soul. He knows better now, so this time he just dials up the charm, deftly deflects whenever things start to get awkward, and overall does an excellent impression of a happy, well-adjusted person who has never been wounded.

That lasts right up until they go to leave. Clay, who quit using his cane as soon as his team came home even though he probably still needs it some days, trips getting up. He stumbles and the edge of the table catches him in the thigh, right over the vicious scar that's hidden beneath his jeans. He goes instantly pale.

Stella is immediately at his side, sliding her arm around his back for support. "Breathe," she murmurs.

It doesn't take him long to plaster back on a bright smile, like a mask over the pain. He plays it off as a joke and manages to look almost like he doesn't need to lean on Stella while they're walking out. Like his arm around her is just a casual display of affection.

He's so good at this that it scares her sometimes. Makes her wonder if there have been times when he's been hurting and even she didn't see it.

Things go okay for a while. Clay recovers, heads back into the field, and Stella realizes time and distance made her forget just how intense and unremitting the fear can be. She fights through it. Starts talking to a therapist. Upholds an uneasy truce with her parents.

And then, just a few months after Clay rejoins Bravo, she gets an unexpected call from her father.

Bravo has been spun up for a couple days now, which means the sound of the phone ringing jolts a spike of fear into Stella's chest. When she sees her father's name on the screen, she exhales sharply in relief and answers. "Hey, Dad."

"Where are you?" He asks immediately. His tone is tight, stressed, underlaid with some emotion she can't place.

"Uh, I'm at Clay's, grading papers. What's going on?" The relief ebbs, replaced by growing worry of a different sort. "Is Mom okay?"

"She's fine. We're all fine." Belying his words, the tension remains. "Are you alone right now? Can you call one of your friends to come be with you?"

Stella forces herself to draw a slow, deep breath into lungs that feel frozen. "Dad," she says with razor-edged calm, "please just tell me what has happened."

There's another pause. In the background, a horn honks. He's driving somewhere. Coming to her?

"Stella," her father says, "I need you to do something for me. Do not look at the news or the internet. Not until someone is there with you."

That's when she knows.

It doesn't make sense that her dad is the one reaching out, not Naima or Blackburn or Harrington, but that doesn't matter. She knows.

The sound she makes first isn't a word at all. Then she manages to say, "Clay." Just his name.

Her father tells her, "There's a video." He pauses. "You shouldn't see it. Okay? No internet. No news. We'll be there as soon as we can."

A video, of-

Of-

She tries to breathe. She's wearing Clay's shirt. He was just here two days ago, and he was real and alive and she touched his face and kissed him, and now there's a _video-_

Her phone buzzes with another incoming call. She looks at the screen. It says _Naima Perry._

Through a fog of bizarre, dissociated calm, she tells her father, "I've got to go. Clay's teammate's wife is calling."

She answers in that same blank, disconnected voice. "Naima."

"Stella, where are you?"

"I'm at Clay's," she says robotically. "My dad called me. He said there was a video."

Naima exhales sharply. "Stay put, okay? I'm on my way."

"Okay." She thinks about asking what's in the video, but realizes she really doesn't want to know. Not yet, because knowing will make it real. And she doesn't think Naima would tell her, either. Not while she's here alone.

Being much closer, Naima gets there first. Comes straight across the room to pull Stella into a fierce hug. She's warm and smells safe and Stella immediately starts shaking so hard she can't stand.

Naima helps her ease back down to the couch, the couch where two days ago Clay sat and laughed at her with his eyes crinkled. Stella looks up through the afterimage of his ghost and asks, "Is he dead?"

Naima's eyes are full of tears. She admits, "I don't know." Adds, "He… they think he was still alive when the video ended. And there hasn't been any more news than that."

Stella nods. Her head feels heavy and unbalanced, like an overfilled water balloon. "What's in the video?" When Naima hesitates, she continues, "I'll find out eventually. It won't get easier. Please just tell me."

Naima's chin wobbles. She looks away. Manages to keep her voice steady when she says, "Clay got captured. They were torturing him. It was bad. The video took off on the internet, and a somewhat censored version of it is being shown on the news."

Deep down, Stella already knew that. Hearing it confirmed aloud feels like getting kicked in the stomach anyway.

"The rest of the team?" She asks.

"Blackburn said they're okay. Safe." Naima pauses. "And furious, I'm sure. Stella, they'll do everything they can to get him back. I promise."

Too late, probably. They'll bring him home to her in a box. What a nice gesture. At least she'll have a mutilated corpse to bury.

Deep down, some part of her knows it's unfair, but she hates them anyway. Having Clay's back is part of their job. Where the fuck _were_ they? How did he end up on video getting tortured, maybe to death, when they're all fine?

The anger breaks through her dissociated calm where the fear and grief couldn't, and suddenly she's sobbing, Naima's arms around her, gentle hands patting her back. Stella keeps crying, gasping sobs that rip through her body and leave her light-headed from hyperventilation.

Other people arrive. Trish is there, and Victoria, and then Stella's parents are too. Eventually Stella panics, feeling like she needs to _run,_ to get away, to somehow claw out of her own skin.

Someone coaxes her into taking a pill. It makes her sleep, black and deep and nothing, like death.

When she wakes up in her own bed, confused and dry-mouthed with a medicine hangover, it takes her a minute to remember. The devastation is just setting in all over again when Naima comes in and hugs her and says fiercely, "They got him, Stella. Clay is alive. They're bringing him home."

This time it isn't grief that makes her unable to stop crying.

She ends up thanking her parents but sending them home; they're awkward and uncomfortable, don't know what to say, how to relate to people like Naima and Trish and Victoria. Still, Stella appreciates that they came. Despite everything, they came.

She barely gets a glimpse of Clay when they bring him into the hospital. He's buried under a mountain of blankets and bandages and tubes and wires, only recognizable by the tuft of unruly blond hair.

Then he's gone, and his team is there instead. They're pale and filthy, obviously tired, and crackling with what looks like barely controlled anger.

Jason Hayes stops in front of Stella, looks at her, can't seem to decide what to say. Beneath the fury and exhaustion, she thinks she sees bone-deep regret. If she yelled at him right now, like she really wants to, he might just stand there and take it.

Pushing away the anger at him, she asks, "The people who did this to Clay, are they dead?"

Hayes gives her a cold, humorless smile. "Yes."

It's nothing she ever imagined she would say, and saying it maybe breaks something in her soul, but she does anyway: "Good."

Hayes nods at her, and then he and the rest of the team move on to whatever it is that awaits them - debriefing, showers, rest, whatever. She doesn't have the energy to care.

Stella waits hours before someone finally comes and gets her and brings her to Clay.

Outside the room, the doctor meets her to give a summary of her boyfriend's injuries, and she can't decide whether to cry or throw up.

He has multiple broken bones from being beaten within an inch of his life. That's not even the worst part. The worst part is the second- and third-degree burns across much of his torso, because his captors set him on fire.

That was the part they filmed and posted on the internet, apparently. Clay burning and screaming and screaming, because no amount of training can prepare you for that.

If Clay lives, and they don't know that he will, he should recover eventually. The bones will mend. Providing he survives the burns, they will heal too, though he'll have a lot of scarring. Might need skin grafts. They're still evaluating him.

Clay's condition is so fragile right now that even just catching a cold would likely kill him, so they've got him in a sterile room, which is also kept very warm because the burns prevent him from being able to properly regulate his own body temperature. Under the gown and mask and hair cover they made her wear, Stella sweats, struggles to get enough oxygen, grows so overheated she thinks she might faint. Or maybe that's partly just the shock of seeing how bad it really is.

The man she loves is so still, only the rise and fall of his heavily bandaged chest confirming that he's alive. Under the bulky oxygen mask, his face is horribly battered, both eyes swollen shut. He'll need reconstructive surgery on an orbital socket, a cheekbone, but they're waiting on that, prioritizing the burns. Waiting to see if he'll even survive to be reconstructed.

He does, because Clay Spenser is stubborn as hell, and if there's one thing he knows how to do, it's fight.

There are skin grafts and surgeries and infections. His condition improves, deteriorates, improves again. Sometimes Stella thinks he recognizes her, but he's never truly coherent, not for a long time afterward.

She stays with him as much as she can, trading off shifts with his team. They're mostly quiet and subdued. Beneath the surface, she's still angry with them, still wants some kind of explanation, but she buries that, pushes it aside.

Once, she overhears Sonny talking to Clay, holding his hand, apologizing, begging him to be all right. The big Texan is crying, and Stella realizes she has maybe underestimated just how strong their friendship is.

When Clay finally, finally talks again, after most of the grafts and the surgeries are over, the first thing he says to her is, "Stella." Then he blinks a few times and adds, "Ow."

She laughs through tears. "Yeah, I'm sure."

Clay's recovery is long and excruciating. By the time he finally manages to get out of bed to take a few steps, he has grown famine-thin, his bruised face drawn and hollow. His legs itch unbearably where they took the skin for the grafts; the pain from the regenerating nerve endings in his healing burns is so incessant that he has trouble sleeping. He has to wear pressure garments, which he hates, and do constant stretches to prevent contractures that could severely decrease his range of motion. There's months of enduring intense physical therapy that leaves him cranky and exhausted.

He claims not to remember much of anything from the 10 horrific hours he spent in captivity. The nightmares say otherwise. Stella is relieved when Blackburn insists that Clay see a therapist, and though Clay complains about it at first, it does help.

Slowly, in fits and starts, they move forward. Clay stops needing help with everyday tasks. The burn scars, though they'll always be visible, start to flatten and fade from their initial angry red. (Clay's only real concern about the scars, or at least the only one he will admit, is that they ruined some of his tattoos.)

He regains weight and flexibility, sleeps better, starts working out again. The first time they go running together and Clay actually beats Stella, she cries in the shower afterward, not sure whether she feels more happy (because Clay is happy) or devastated (because he's going back into the field, she _knows_ he is, and she isn't sure she can do this again).

The morning of his first mission back with Bravo, she looks at him and wonders what planet men like him come from, because in the past few years he's been shot and blown up and _deliberately set on fire,_ and now the prospect of getting back out there has him shining with happiness like it's Christmas morning.

She kisses him and says, "Be careful," and he grins at her and responds, "You know me."

(She does. That's kind of the problem.)

The fear is worse this time. It eats at her like acid, like flame. She struggles to focus, and she thinks about breaking up with him, and wonders if that's even possible anymore. If she could bear to give up a single moment of however much time she has remaining with him.

His capture, the video, the way it played out was awful. What would have been worse would have been not even knowing what had happened to him until she accidentally stumbled across the video days or weeks later and realized who she was watching burn. That might have completely broken her.

So she hangs on. Naima and Trish help. Stella starts seeing her therapist again, gets prescribed medication to help with the anxiety. Things get better, bit by bit, as Clay comes back from missions alive and smiling and safe; as Stella secures promises from each of his teammates to take care of him, to not let it happen again.

Clay asks her to marry him, and this time she says yes. They have a wedding. Later, they have a set of twin girls, who cry when Clay leaves and squeal with joy when he returns. He dances around the kitchen with them, one in each arm, and they giggle and look at him like he hung the moon.

Stella's parents still aren't exactly thrilled with her choice, but their sweet, curly-haired granddaughters help them learn to accept what they can't change.

As for Clay, he still gets hurt sometimes, comes home limping and wearing a smile painted over the pain to console his girls… but he always comes home.

* * *

There was originally one more line at the end, but I removed it because 1) I realized it wasn't the conclusion I wanted and 2) it would have made y'all hate me.

There might be a second part eventually, if I ever get around to finishing it.


	2. Chapter 2

Stella never actually ends up seeing any part of the video, not even screenshots. Intellectually she is aware that it's still out there, still occasionally getting reposted on the darker corners of the internet, but she chooses for her own sanity not to dwell on that knowledge. Clay, she knows, takes the same approach.

It never even occurs to either of them to mention the video to their daughters until much too late.

Addie and Charlotte have seen their father's old, faded scars. They are aware he's been badly injured in the past, that he was burned, suffered shrapnel wounds, but they don't know a lot of specifics, and they seem content not to ask.

A few weeks after they turn 12, the girls come home from school on a seemingly normal Friday afternoon, and Stella can tell the instant they walk through the door that something is horribly wrong.

Addie is in the middle of a panic attack, the first she's had in months. She's paper white, eyes wide, breathing in shallow gasps, her hands fumbling aimlessly at the straps of her backpack. Charlotte has an arm around her sister's shoulders, bracing her, holding her up. Her lips are pressed together and she's absolutely pale with fury.

Fear claws at Stella's throat. "What happened?" She crosses the room in an instant, pulling Addie tight to her chest as though she can retroactively shield her daughter from whatever caused this. "Char, what is it?"

Charlotte, her warrior child, Clay's daughter through and through, clenches her fists at her sides, takes a deep breath, and looks up at her mother with such anger in her blue eyes that Stella nearly steps back reflexively.

"One of the boys in our class said there was a video he wanted to show us."

Stella's heart drops through the floor.

No. Oh, God, _no._

Addie, her wet face pressed up against Stella's collarbone, draws choppy, stuttering breaths and gasps out, "It- it was- Mom, it was-"

"Oh, baby," is all Stella can manage to say. "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry."

She is, to the depths of her soul.

How could they not have thought of this? Seen it coming?

"They burned him and they were _laughing,"_ Charlotte snarls, fists clenching and unclenching. "They were _laughing_ at him. And we thought- we didn't know if, if it was- it took us a minute to remember Dad's scars and realize it was from a long time ago."

God.

They thought it was something that had just happened.

That they were watching their father die.

Stella's first instinct is to gather her girls into her arms - whether Charlotte comes willingly or not - and never let them go. Her second instinct, nearly as strong as the first, is to hunt down the useless little shit-head who showed them that video and demonstrate to him exactly why he shouldn't have.

Stella doesn't let herself act on either of those impulses. Instead, she focuses on the here and now. She holds Addie and rubs her back and coaches her on breathing slow and deep. She stays out of the way and lets Charlotte pace and rant and spit fury until she suddenly runs out of steam and collapses on the couch, face pale and pinched, legs shaking.

Charlotte runs her hands through her tangled curls, so roughly that she comes away with torn strands caught between her fingers. "Where's Dad?" She asks abruptly, her voice cracked and unsteady, sounding uncharacteristically like a little girl. "Right now, where is he?"

Lord, Stella wishes she had an answer to that question.

Of _course_ this would happen when Clay is spun up.

He's had his own team for six months now and finally feels like he's really settling into the job. They'd been doing so well lately, all of them: the girls in school, Stella with her tenure track, Clay with his new role. She feels the dizzying, gut-wrenching sense that this one brutal act of cruelty by a thoughtless child could spin their entire family off its axis.

Stella long ago found a way to make peace with Clay's life, because for 15 years now it's been her life as well. It is still sometimes an uneasy peace, but nowhere near as much as it used to be.

Today is the first day in a long time that she's felt even a little bit like that terrified girl on the tarmac, sobbing because of how desperately she feared continuing to love the man she wanted to spend her life with.

The last time she felt like this, actually, might have been the day the twins were born, when she looked at their sweet scrunched faces and peach-fuzz hair and truly realized what she had done. The life she'd brought her babies into, without them ever being given any choice in the matter.

"Mom?" Addie whispers, still teary but calmer, and Stella realizes she never answered Charlotte's question.

"I don't know," she admits. "But he should be home soon, okay?"

Please God let him be home soon. This can't be the time where something goes wrong and he ends up delayed, or in a hospital, or... worse.

_Please come home, Clay. I need you. We need you._

* * *

The mission goes off without a hitch. That doesn't prevent Clay from being tired as hell by the time it's over. He takes an Ambien, passes out on the flight home, and wakes up feeling a lot better, which lasts right up until he walks through the door just before dinnertime and gets a good look at his daughters' faces. Then his adrenaline spikes like he's back in a war zone.

Something is very wrong.

Addie flings herself at him, her lanky form crashing into his chest with such force that it knocks him back a step. Charlotte stays back, wearing a thundercloud expression.

"What is it?" Clay asks, almost surprised by the calm of his own voice. "Addie, what happened?"

He thinks of Stella suddenly, flashes back to Alana Hayes's death, but he looks up and his wife is standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Her lips are pressed together. She looks angry, but not really at him.

It takes a few minutes for them to explain what happened, Charlotte and Stella doing most of the talking while Adeline just quietly clings.

When Clay understands, he's instantly furious at himself, because he should have seen this coming. His girls should have been forewarned. Them getting blindsided like this, that's on him.

He says as much, apologizing while steering Addie toward the couch. He ends up sitting with her tucked up against one side of him and Stella against the other. Charlotte settles in the recliner across from them. Clay tosses her the hoodie he wore for the plane ride back, and she nearly disappears inside it.

They reassure the girls. Remind them that it's in the past, that Clay is okay now, that he's safe and nothing like that has happened to him in a long, long time.

After things have calmed down a bit, after Addie has recovered enough to leverage the trauma into some pre-dinner ice cream for herself and her sister, Clay casually asks, "The kid who showed y'all that video, what's his name?"

Over Addie's head, Stella meets his gaze, shaking her head very slightly in warning.

She always has been able to read him.

"James Blye," Addie replies around a mouthful of ice cream. Then she catches sight of her mother's expression and stops dead, immediately seeming to realize she maybe shouldn't have said that. Eyes widening, she turns to Clay. "Dad, no! He's a jerk, but he's just- you can't-"

Adeline Spenser in a nutshell: Heart big enough to care about the entire world. Including her own bully, apparently.

Clay has seen the worst humanity has to offer, and it still stuns him sometimes that anyone could deliberately choose to hurt a person like Addie, just for the hell of it.

Softening his expression, he gently tousles her curly hair. "I won't hurt him, I promise. Just want to talk to him and his parents."

Across from them in the recliner, Charlotte pulls her face out of the overlarge hoodie to show off a distinctly disappointed expression. Clay is pretty sure she was hoping to be invited along to a disemboweling.

If it were only Charlotte's feelings at stake, only her trauma to deal with, she might be quicker to forgive. The child can hold a vicious grudge when it comes to someone or something, anything, harming her sister.

Clay forces himself to wait until the next day to go talk to the little asshole's parents - both to give himself time to calm down, and to give Addie and Charlotte his undivided attention for a while.

On Saturday evening, he strolls up to the Blye home and knocks. Just his luck, it's the kid himself who answers the door, his eyes widening when he sees who's standing there.

"You're James, right?" Clay asks calmly.

Ashen and silent, the boy nods.

"Hi, James. I'm Charlotte and Adeline's dad, but I'm guessing you already know that." He keeps his tone light and casual, which if anything seems to make the kid more scared, not less. He looks like he's waiting to be executed.

James's mom, whom Clay vaguely remembers meeting at some point, appears in the living room behind him. "What's this about?" She asks cautiously.

Still looking at her son, Clay continues in that same calm tone, "You probably already know I'm in the Navy. Team guy. A couple years before my girls were born, I got captured for about 10 hours before my team found me and pulled me out. James, you want to tell your mom what happened during those 10 hours?"

James shakes his head no.

"Come on," Clay coaxes patiently. "You were so eager to share, weren't you? Why don't you tell your mom? Better yet, you could pull up the video for her. Why don't you do that?"

James is trembling now, his eyes welling with tears. He shakes his head again.

Clay sighs. "Okay, fine. I'll do it." He takes out his phone. "Mrs. Blye, would you like to see the video your son showed my girls?"

Nearly hyperventilating now, James says, "Please. Please don't."

Clay stops. "You know, James," he says, "if you didn't think it was a video your mom should see, maybe you _shouldn't have shown it to my daughters."_

"Jamey, what did you do?" Mrs. Blye's voice is soft with horror. Her son looks away, fingers tangled in his T-shirt, face streaked with tears. He doesn't answer, so Clay does for him.

"While I was in enemy hands, they set me on fire," he says, with the collected distance of someone who has had a very long time to learn to cope. "They filmed it. There's a video that's about two solid minutes of me screaming the way people and animals do when their skin gets burned off. I'll let you imagine how pleasant that is to see and hear. Especially when you're 12 years old. And it's your father in the video. And you already worry about his dangerous job. And you have a history of panic attacks, which James already knew Addie does. Didn't you, James?"

The boy nods jerkily.

"Oh my God." Mrs. Blye, now as ashen as her son, looks at him. "James, I- why would you _do_ that?"

He wails, "I don't _know!"_

"Well, you might want to think on it," Clay tells him. "And there's something I need you to do for me, James. I need you to stay away from my girls. You do not talk to them, go near them, or _look_ at them. Is that understood?"

James nods again.

"Oh my God," his mom repeats. In a near-frantic tone, she tells Clay, "I am so sorry. I have no idea why he would do this. I'll talk to his father. We'll make sure he stays away from Charlotte and Adeline."

Clay nods at her. "Thank you." He starts to turn away, but hesitates before leaving. "You know, James," he says, his tone back to calm and casual, "when I got captured, the first thing they did was take away all of my weapons and gear and beat the absolute hell out of me. It was probably the most helpless I've ever been. They looked at me and knew that they held all the power. They could hurt me however much they wanted and there wasn't a thing I could do to stop it." He pauses. "They looked at me, and they chose to light that match and watch me burn. Because they could. Because they had the power to."

Another pause, long enough that the boy finally looks up.

Clay, his voice very soft now, says, "You had that power over my girls, and you decided to light the match. Because you could."

James's chin wobbles. He glances back down.

"That choice you made," Clay tells him, "there will be consequences for it. It's not just gonna go away. But you still get to decide who you're going to be from here on out, and what you'll do different next time. I'd advise giving that some very careful thought."

James seems to realize a response is required of him. He nods and croaks, "Yes, sir."

Clay walks away and doesn't look back.

He's so damn proud of himself for not just straight-up throttling the little shit that he ends up calling Jason on the way home to tell him about it.

And then he realizes that he needs to make sure the boy's identity is never revealed to Sonny, because Sonny Quinn is maybe a tad overprotective of his goddaughters and might not handle this as calmly as Clay has somehow managed to.

Back home, he immediately gets tackle-hugged by his clingy daughter again. Adeline has been a snuggler since the day she was born. Charlotte, on the other hand, transformed into a tiny, personal space-loving human porcupine somewhere around the age of five, and while all the rejected hugs sometimes leave Clay feeling like there's a hollow beneath his ribs, he respects who his daughter is and how she shows love.

He ends up parked back on the couch with Addie, because what his girls seem to need the most right now is just his presence. As if to underscore just how true that is, Charlotte flops down at his other side, leaning her head against his shoulder in a rare open display of affection.

After a few minutes, she asks, "How did you survive that?"

Though he knows he's pushing his luck, Clay can't help but slide his arm around her, pulling her a little closer. He takes his time, then responds, "Well, like you, I am _unbelievably_ stubborn."

That draws a genuine laugh from Adeline, which is probably the best sound Clay has heard all day.

"And I had a lot to live for," he continues, "and I had my team. They took care of me. Always."

Charlotte's eyebrows draw together, a sure sign that she's turning something over in her head. "Like you take care of your team now?"

"Yeah," he says softly. "Like that. I learned from the best."

She nods. "Then it's good that they have you," she says matter-of-factly.

Clay swallows against the lump that has suddenly appeared in his throat. Before he has a chance to respond, Addie pops her head up and asks, "And you have them too, right? They still take care of you too, right? Even though you're the team leader?"

"Absolutely," he tells her. "They take care of me, too."

Addie searches his expression, seems to approve of what she finds, and flops back down. "Good," she proclaims. "That's good."

There are promises he wishes he could make them, but he can't. His girls don't ask him to. They let it go. Let it be enough.

He holds them close, safe and warm, until they fall asleep.

* * *

That's all! This one was weird. Thanks for reading it anyway.


End file.
